Energy Consumption

We tested the energy consumption of our servers for a one-minute period in several scenario. The first scenario is the point where the server under testing performs best in MySQL: the highest throughput just before the response time goes up significantly.

To test the power usage of the FPU, we measure the power consumption when POV-Ray was using all available threads.

SKU

TDP
(on paper)
spec

Idle
Server

W

MySQL
Best Throughput
at Lowest Resp. Time (*)
(W)

POV-Ray
100% CPU load

Dual Xeon E5-2699 v4

2x145 W

106

412

425

Dual Xeon 8176

2x165W

190

300

453

Dual EPYC 7601

2x180W

151

321

327

Both the Xeon 8176 and Dual EPYC server had a few more additional components (a separate 10 GBe card for example) than the Dual Xeon E5-2699v4 system, but that does not fully explain why idle power is so much higher, especially on the Dual Xeon 8176. We lacked the time to fully investigate this, and the last two systems have relatively new firmware.

The only conclusion that we can draw so far, is that the EPYC 7601 is likely to draw more power when running integer applications, while the rather wide FP units of the Intel CPUs are real power hogs even if they do not run heavy AVX applications. To be continued...

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219 Comments

For years I thought you were just really committed to playing the "dumb AMD fanbot" schtick for laughs. It's infinitely more funny now that I know you've actually been *serious* this entire time. Reply

Whatever helps you feel better about yourself ;) I bet it is funny now, that AT have to carefully devise intel biased benches and lie in its reviews in hopes intel at least saves face. BTW I don't have a single amd CPU running ATM.Reply

Well, that assumption rests on the presumption that the point of reviews is to upsed fanboys.

I'd say that a "review done right" would include different workload scenarios, there is nothing wrong with having one that will show the benefits of intel's approach to doing server chips, but that should be properly denoted, and should be just one of several database tests and should be accompanied by gigabytes of databases which is what we use in real world scenarios.Reply

It was mentioned more than once that this review was rushed to make a deadline and that the suite of benchmarks were not everything they wanted to run and without optimizations or even the usual tweaks an end-user would make to their system. So, keep that in mind as you argue over the tests and different scenarios, etc.Reply

It doesn't take a lot of time to populate a larger database so that you can make a benchmark that involves an actual real world usage scenario. It wasn't the "rushing" that prompted the choice of database size...Reply